Monthly Archive October 2018

Facebook is reportedly looking to acquire a major cyber security firm following a massive breach that compromised data from 30 million accounts.

The company has approached several unnamed cyber security providers about potential acquisitions, according to The Information.

Facebook’s push to ramp up its security comes in the wake of what it termed its biggest cyber security breach ever that affected user phone numbers, email addresses and recent searches.

The social media giant, after a preliminary review, says the hack was likely carried out by spammers, according to the Wall Street Journal, not a state-sponsored attack as some had feared.

The hackers were able to exploit a vulnerability in the platform’s “View As” feature that lets users see what their profile looks like to other users, depending on their privacy settings. The hackers were able to gain access codes to user accounts without having their passwords.

Facebook has said that it’s working with the FBI about the breach.

The hack came after a difficult year of setbacks for Facebook, starting with revelations that Russian trolls had manipulated its platform in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook hit a nadir during the Cambridge Analytica scandal when it was revealed that the British research firm improperly obtained user data from 87 million Facebook accounts which were then allegedly used for voter suppression efforts and other election-related actions.

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Late last month Facebook announced its massive security breach that allowed an unknown group of hackers to steal secret access tokens for millions of accounts by taking advantage of a flaw in the ‘View As’ feature.

At the time of the initial disclosure, Facebook estimated that the number of users affected by the breach could have been around 50 million, though a new update published today by the social media giant downgraded this number to 30 million.

Out of those 30 million accounts, hackers successfully accessed personal information from 29 million Facebook users, though the company assured that the miscreants apparently didn’t manage to access any third-party app data.

Here’s How Facebook Classified the Stolen Data:

Facebook vice president of product management Guy Rosen published a new blog post Friday morning to share further details on the massive security breach, informing that the hackers stole data from those affected accounts, as follows:

For about 15 million Facebook users, attackers accessed two sets of information: usernames and contact information including phone numbers, email addresses and other contact information depending on what users had on their profiles.

For about 14 million Facebook users, attackers accessed an even wider part of their personal data, including the same two sets of information mentioned above, along with other details users had on their profiles, like gender, language, relationship status, religion, hometown, current city, birth date, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches.

A remaining 1 million Facebook users did not have any personal data accessed by the attackers.

Besides this, Rosen also added that the attackers had no information to data from “Messenger, Messenger Kids, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Pages, payments, third-party apps, or advertising or developer accounts.”

Moreover, hackers also were not able to access any private message content, with one notable exception—If a user is a Facebook page administrator who had received or exchanged messages from someone on Facebook, the content of those messages was exposed to the attackers.

Here’s How to Check If You Are One of 30 Million Affected Users

Facebook said users can check whether they were affected by the breach by visiting the social network’s Help Center.

Facebook also added that the company will directly inform those 30 million users affected to explain what information the attackers might have accessed, along with steps they can take to help protect themselves from any suspicious emails, text messages, or calls.

So far the identity of the hackers remains unclear, but Rosen said Facebook is working with the FBI, the US Federal Trade Commission, Irish Data Protection Commission, and other authorities to investigate who might be behind the breach or if they were targeting anyone in particular.